Reweaving the Very Fabric of Time
Well, at least in our novels.
With our epic read-aloud of the Science Trilogy complete, we’re sprucing up the middle book just a bit before handing it off to our beta readers. While Kent composes new epigraphs (and rests his voice), Jen tackled breaking the narrative into chapters, largely so that Kent would know how many epigraphs he needed to write.
The second and third books in the Science Series were written back-to-back, and in our rush to get the third one underway, we stopped while the epigraphs were still only half-formed. (For anyone who doesn’t know, an epigraph is a little snippet or quotation that goes at the beginning of a chapter. Oftentimes authors will choose quotes or song lyrics that have thematic resonance; We write our own and attribute them to in-story sources.)
Chapterizing, though, is something we always do after a draft is complete. Most authors we talk to write their novels in pre-chapterized chunks. That method doesn’t work for us. The very idea feels somehow artificial. Here’s the highly scientific process we follow: Write each scene on its own and string them all together, so that a Skelley first draft is just one enormous blob. It’s easier for us to divide the blob into 20 or 25 roughly even chunks when we see how big the blob actually is. It’s verrrrrrry important to Jen that the chunks all be approximately even, so the chapterizing generally falls to her. Kent sometimes teases her about getting out the calipers and micrometers to ensure perfection.
There’s more to it than just word count, though, otherwise it would be easy. So easy even Kent could do it. In order to pull the reader along through the story, each chapter should end on something dramatic. Some writing advice will tell you that not only every chapter, but every page, every paragraph, every sentence, nay! every word and syllable should end on rising action, propelling your story to the speed of light and giving yourself and your readers tension headaches from all the stress. We like to give everyone time to breathe. Just not, you know, at the end of a chapter.
As written, Son of Science Novel was not cooperating when it came to roughly even chapter breaks. Either the size of the chapters varied too much and made Jen’s eye twitch, or they were of nice enough length, but ended on a soft, gentle note that was a little too settled and made us both frown. The solution was to fuck around with the flow of time, of course. The story involves characters who are on separate continents for a while, their actions untethered from each other even as they are propelled toward each other. It’s that “untethered” part that makes them portable. Jen was able to shuffle the order of a few scenes, and everything fell into place. Now each chapter ends on a line that compels the reader to keep reading,
We’ll have to read through the first half again before we hand it to our beta readers, to make sure that it all still makes sense. But that’s alright, because it’s a really good book!
Having a writing partner means having someone to make fun of your more OCD tendencies while fully trusting you to make the right edits anyway.